Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: by which they accounted for his sudden retirement from the world, and her death, which followed, in Italy, close upon it. This was the story which had currency in the county among those who cared for Silcote ;md his affairs, until they got tired of them, and cared for them no longer. But there was a still darker part of the story, only mentioned among a very few, and always discredited with scorn by any one who had ever known the unfortunate deceased Mrs. Silcote,—a story so dark and so terrible, that it seemed to account in a credible manner for Henry Silcote's extraordinary conduct. The story was this : He had sulked so persistently and so inexorably with her, that she had lost her reason and attempted his life. It was only whispered among very few, and soon died out and was forgotten. It was monstrous, horrible, incredible; too much so to make a pleasant subject of gossip among those who had known her. It was soon dropped, even by the very few. Old Mr. Silcote, meanwhile, shared the retirement of his son soon after the Exeter esclandre. There was something extremely wrong, and the hospitable, genial old man seemed to believe it. He lived for four years ; at the end of which time his son Henry inherited Silcotes, and came back to live there, with another wife and son. CHAPTER VI. ABOUT THE PRINCESS. He had married again! When, where, and to whom, nobody knew. It must have been unreasonably soon after his unhappy wife's death. Old Silcote, not long before her death, told Lady Ascot that there was a new mistress of Silcote and a new heir, and that the new bride was a lady of faultless character. That was all that was known. Consequently, when Silcote returned and took possession, she, the kindest and gentlest of women, at once called on the new Mrs. Silcote. Her ...